I had some time to play with the N810 while attending 24C3. The interesting part was that I saw quite a lot of people with a N810 in their hands - the ones I talked to had it imported from the U.S.

Since the N810 is mostly like the N800 (software wise) I only checkout the hardware. First impression was very good. The case looks very nice. I think it is a very clean design no bumps or strange edges. (Pictures don't tell you anything when it comes to hardware like this.) For me the most important thing to try was the keyboard since it is the novel part of the N-series. So I was very pleased to find it working just fine - much better then I expected (also I only had a couple of minutes). Sliding the keyboard up and down also seems to work nicely.

All in all it was a nice experience and I'm looking forward to get my own.

**UPDATE! Please see this post for download link and latest video: http://geekpenguin.blogspot.com/2008/01/pyano.html**


I have to admit, this is the most fun I've had with my n770. Ever

Well, I saw this on my brother's Mac a while ago, a little program that acted as an on-screen piano. I liked it. Then tonight I thought, how cool would that be on a touch screen? Pretty freakin' cool, actually. So, I decided to write one my self since no one else had. This is the magic of Python. With fifteen minutes and a piano to record the notes off of, even an idiot like me can make something as fun as this

**update: I added the sharp/flat keys (black keys), but they don't look very good, hm...**





Please, tell me if you would like to have this on the tablet, I'm not sure whether I should bother to develop this for others, or just as a project for me.



Hope you like

Wladimir Palant, the original Adblock and Adblock Plus Firefox web-addon developer, among other complainings, has pointed out an important security hole in initial version of the Adblock Plus Microb port :

"... So I downloaded this Adblock Plus version and soon it was obvious that it is inserting an Adblock Plus button into all web pages the user visits — using my favicon as the image on the button. Which makes me the lucky guy who can track every move MicroB users do on the Internet (at least if I decide to send HTTP headers preventing caching)."

Happily, Andre Pedralho quickly fixed this issue and uploaded the 0.0.2-1 version of Adblock Plus MicroB port in a few minutes. It is highly recommend for all Adblock Plus (maemo port) users to update their packages to the newest as soon as possible. For the other raised issues by Wladimir in the post entry, including changing the addon port name, we are investigation how much we've changed from the original source to take the proper action.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Well thanks to Nokia and the Maemo people I now have a new gym t-shirt. Read Quim Gils blog post about it.

I depart for CES this Sunday and I have much to do:

• Haircut
• Prepare mobile blogging and site feeds for auto-upload
• Charge all batteries
• Pack
• Finalize schedule

Then it looks something like this:

Sunday:

• Drive to Vegas, check in to hotel
• Registration and badge pick-up
• Samsung press event (maybe)

Monday:

• Interview SanDisk
• Visit Sony (Mylo2?)
  
• Visit Asus (if I don't get the real interview)
• Stop by CES BlogHaus

Tuesday:

• Visit Samsung
• Wander show floor
• Lunch@Piero's, meet with VIA
• Tablet PC/UMPC party at Las Vegas Cheeseburger

Wednesday:

• Wander show floor
• Interview TabletKiosk
• CES 2008 "It Won't Stay In Vegas" blogger party at the Atomic Test Museum

Thursday:

• Tie up loose ends, visit the ones I forgot, get swag
• Check out, drive home.

Still waiting for solid times from:
- Nokia - And I want to spend a lot of time with them!
- Asus (if I get in this one - I hope!)
- Sprint
- Grandpa! (I am supposed to have lunch or dinner with him.)

One feature of the new Mozilla based browser is spacial scrolling. This is where you press the hardware up and down keys and the browser focus jumps to the next/previous link on the page.

I can see a use for this but on pages where links are far apart from each other, say the top and bottom, the 'scroll' actually misses out the whole of the page. This can become annoying if you are using the hardware keys for one handed scrolling.

If, like me you want to turn this feature off there is an option within the browser to do so.



Open a browser window and type about:config into the address bar. In the set preference name box type snav.enabled and in the value box type false. Scrolling should now be more 'predictable'.

(Update: This has been taken off-line until further notice, sorry guys.)
(Update 2: This is just friggin' great, I love how Nokia prohbits re-friggin'-distribution of software to help other people. Nice. Peachy keen. Here's what is stopping a Linux GUI for the flasher from anyone, not just me:

"3. LIMITATIONS ON END-USER RIGHTS.

You may not copy, distribute, or make derivative works of the Software
except as follows:

.......

(e) Unless stated otherwise in the Documentation, You shall not display, modify, reproduce, or distribute any of the Stock Files included with the Software. In the event that the Documentation allows You to display the Stock Files, You shall not distribute the Stock Files on a stand-alone basis, i.e., in circumstances in which the Stock Files constitute the primary value of the product being distributed. You should review the "Readme" files associated with the Stock Files that You use to ascertain what rights You have with respect to such materials. Stock Files may not be used in the production of libelous, defamatory, fraudulent, infringing, lewd, obscene, or pornographic material or in any otherwise illegal manner. You may not register or claim any rights in the Stock Files or derivative works thereof."


I think it's great to prohibit selling it, I even don't mind not releasing the source. But that really ticks me off, stopping people from helping other people. So I'm hoping maybe the owner of this property will distribute a GUI for Linux, Nokia.

And, really, who cares, Nokia, if you GPL your flasher source? Is someone really foaming at the mouth waiting for this source code because it holds some super valuable trade secret?

Come on, Nokia, be a nice a guy and let the community redistribute it and package it and just generally make it easier for the end user.

I'm gonna keep the post here at the bottom just for reference...)




Yo!

I really don't know why no one has done something so simple but useful as this before, but it really doesn't matter, so now I get to to do it for everyone

This is for Ubuntu and it should work on Debian systems.



This is PyFlash. The Nokia Flasher has been packaged as as a deb file along with a super simple GUI I wrote in Python. I have never packaged anything for Ubuntu before, so I'm a little iffy with this one. It installed under "Others" on my application bar thing. So, I dunno where it'll install for you.

Alright, all of my code (/usr/bin/pyflash) is released under the GNU GPL:
Unavailable

Please tell me if there are any problems or if it does not work!

Greasemonkey webaddon port for MicroB is now installable on Chinook again. Some have reported installation problems on chinook due to a libhildonmime0 incompatibility problem, but it is just fixed.

Tested on both bora (n800) and chinook (n800 and n810).

Have a nice browsing.

Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

I have not had a chance to try this, but I am very excited at the prospect of what is offered within the Internet Communications Software Update 2. If you’ve been looking to enhance the presence and messaging options within the default system this looks to be just what the doctor ordered. After installation, you should be able to add any IM account through the main system account options (in Control Panel) which will then work from the presence control.

One caveat of note — you will need to activate “red pill” mode to install. This is not a deal breaker, but you should tread lightly once activated if you fall into the more novice end of things.

Added and updated features
Telepathy-haze

Now you can use nearly all of the great IM services supported by pidgin (formerly known as gaim) open-source application - all from the comfort for your native IM/Voip client in your N8×0 device.

To see the list of services/protocols supported by pidgin, visit: http://www.pidgin.im/. Please note that not all protocols are enabled for now, but they can be added later on.

To use it, simply create your IM account in the device normally and the wizard will let you select the type of service you want (you will see more services listed there).

Telepathy-salut

Be connected to your neighbourhood instantly. This is a link-local instant messaging that requires no external service or server. Your buddy list (roster) will automatically consist of everyone present in the local network. Extremely useful for on-the-spot social networking in parties or conferences .

Oh, and it is zero configuration IM. You only set your full name for others to see. To use it, simply create an account using the wizard in and select ‘link-local (xmpp)’ as the service.

Chat log viewer

If you have wished you could see your past chat messages for reference or simply to recall some important information, worry no more. With IMLogViewer application (installed in ‘Extra’ application menu), you will be able to see all your past chat messages exchanged with your friends.
SIP Profiles

There are now some pre-configured SIP profiles for some major providers. This would ease configuring SIP accounts in the device. They are:

• Ekiga.net
• FreeWorldDialup
• Sipphone.com (same as used by gizmo)

Note:You can also create profiles yourself by adding a profile description file (.profile) to the directory /usr/share/osso-rtcom/ (See existing profiles for an example).

I’ll get this installed tonight. If you install and have issues or positive reports to share, please do so in the comments.

Technorati Tags: IM, Presence, SIP, Profile, Nokia, N-Series, N800, N810, Telepathy-haze, Telepathy-salut, maemo

Alrighty, then, lets take this from the top ;)



PyFlash is a GUI for the official Nokia Flashing Tool for Linux.

I rewrote my PyFlash program to be more user friendly (and legal)! Clearly, I am not very handy with the GIMP, and I could never be a designer, but, eh, it works for right now.



I also added the option to enable USB Host Mode, which is nice to have in the GUI. Hopefully I will be able to add more options later.



Again, this is for Debian based systems, specifically Ubuntu. PyFlash requires Python to be installed. Some users may need to run this program as root depending on your setup and USB permissions.

PyFlash is released under the GNU GPL:
Here is the PyFlash 0.1.deb

Please tell me of any problems or if it does not work!

Great news !

Today, I have ordered my Nokia Internet Tablet N810 ! And lucky me, the N810 discount code for my Maemo contribution was accepted.

Now, I have just to be patient a few more days, ...

Thanks to the Maemo team for their appreciation.

Let's hope the other 499 Maemo contributors can use their N810 discount code asap.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Hi again!



Well, I thought about it, and I decided to follow a free software motto that I was recently reminded of "Release early and release often." So I'm gonna release an alpha version of PyAno. Right now it only has one octave of keys, starting at A, ending at G#. But, I like playing around with it, and I've shown it to a few friends and they liked it ;) So, I'm hoping you'll enjoy this little preview, too!

PyAno is released under the GNU GPL:
Here is PyAno 0.1.deb

First of all, a summary is the overview of your E-mail folder or mailbox. It shows you the cc, to, from, subject of each E-mail. In IMAP terminology people also call this the ENVELOPE of each E-mail. Showing all ENVELOPEs of a folder is showing the summary to the user. Some people want more than just the cc, to, from and subject to be visible. Most E-mail clients also indicate the read and importance status of the E-mails in this view. Some E-mail clients also show the size of the E-mail. Whatever yours shows, that is what I’ll here call … the summary.

I’ve read similar stories but the actual position in Amazon.com was different. Now the positions are quite good. Here you can see that the N800 is #1 and the N810 is #5. I guess we must be doing something good

Yes, that's a picture of an espresso machine above. Specifically, it's the Christmas gift I got for myself. Read this blog long enough and you'll know how valuable it is to me.

Update (5.1.2008 02:35):
Confirmation mail came from Nokia, codes should now work for: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom. Canadians have more info next week. But thank you Nokia for the discount and the device!

After Jan Jansen’s blog post I decided to do some clicking around Nokia’s online shops. It seems that the N810 is available for order from all of the shops listed on this page.

This should be a surprise at least for Finnish customers, because as seen in the following pictures N810 shouldn’t be available yet.

Nseries.com (location finland):

Nokia Nseries Online Shop:

What is happening on January 23rd? Well, Burt Rutan is going to made his new SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two public. Read more about it from Engadget from here: Scaled composites to unveil the SpaceShipTwo. So far there have been only artist renderings of the forthcoming craft, but now you are supposed to see it for real. This is propably the coolest thing happening on Earth right now (IMHO).

And it is also Kate’s birthday .

Feedbacks and bug report are welcome.



Project page: http://garage.maemo.org/projects/mtv/

There’s a storm currently rolling through the Bay Area. Not really a major storm for most places, but we don’t get weather too frequently. My power had been flickering, and just a few minutes ago finally knocked off completely. I was starnding at the window for a few minutes before I realized I have no idea what to do with myself. “I can still blog with the N810 over the N95s internet connection” was my first full thought. Probably not a healthy state of affairs in retrospect.

I have programming I can work on, but being mostly disconnected from the network its hardly as effective. I’m feeling the isolation and dumbness of being cut off from my external storage devices pretty sharply right now.

I love how convergence devices and Linux allow me to pack extra light for the show. Clockwise from the top:

• Nokia N95-3 which will be providing my mobile broadband access, live photo stream, and occasional Qik video.
  
• Nokia N800 (or N810 if I find I can borrow one) which will be providing my live microblogging and hold my show maps and quick notes.
• Asus EeePC running Ubuntu off an 8GB SDHC card which will allow me to post more text-heavy entries. There are four SD cards going along: 2x4GB, 2x8GB
• GoldX cable kit. Always handy to keep around.
• Canon Powershot S5-IS to provide high resolution photos and video for uploading from the hotel room or after the show.
• Inside circle clockwise from top: APC USB battery for emergency charging of the N800 or N95
• SanDisk SD/Mini/Micro card reader
• TrendNet bluetooth dongle
• Kensington USB power tip for Nokia devices
• Retractable USB to Mini-USB cable
• Spare batteries
  

The bag has 3.6 pounds of stuff and the camera (worn around the neck) is another 1.3 pounds. For the sake of comparison: the sleek (and smaller model) 15" MacBook Pro is 5.4 pounds all by itself.

Notably absent in my CES gadget bag are: Hard drives, Windows, or Mac OS X devices. Indeed, I will be generating content entirely with Linux and with my N95.

Here's how to follow the coverage:

• TabletBlog.com will have all my Nokia Internet Tablet coverage, Nokia interviews, accessories and technologies of interest to that crowd. Also all my Web 2.0 features will be in there.
• UltraMobileGeek.com will have UMPCs, tablet PCs, embedded Linux devices, green energy devices (a new interest of mine) and the fantastic "everything else I find interesting" category.
• My YouTube Channel will host all videos except a few I may try to stream live with Qik. The Qik videos will appear live and then remain there for future viewing.
• My Flickr Photostream will automatically upload EVERY photo I take with the N95-3. I hope I don't live to regret that one.
• If all of that looks intimidating to you, just watch my Jaiku channel which aggregates all of the above (except Flickr and Qik) and includes my text microblogging too.

I have to go clean my car, get an oil change, finish packing ... See you there!

Wow, about 9 months without posts on the blog. I've been busy on my job and enjoying on other matters.

The greatest news are that our family will have a new member on March.
We are waiting a daughter and alot of arrangements had to be done on our flat. During last 5 weeks I've been painting a room for her as you can see on the picture.

Now there's a new device and a new version of Internet Tablet OS, so it's time to rebuild my maemo projects.
Tuner tool and nethack are ready for the IT2008, you can find the download links on the sideboard.

Note: to install the tuner tool on the tablet you need to install by hand gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-extra from maemo repository.

Hello!



Well, I took a little trip this weekend and decided that since Tim and the Maemo UI guys are being so nice and sharing their backgrounds, I should too.













I tried them all out on tablet, and for some reason they all look a lot better on the Tablet than on my computer's screen. Hope you like em' :-)

Ok, I guess it's still in time to wish people a happy new year. Apart from the obligatory sessions of eating, drinking and reconnecting with my inner-child, Christmas has been a great time to enrich the internal uranium, and I feel full of 235U again. I'm sure I'll need plenty of it in the new year. So, once more, best wishes to all, at let's make the world a better place in 2008.

One thing to get there is of course is to polish that raw diamond that we call modest. I've been quite happy with the progress we've made since our bèta less than one month ago. We've closed quite a number of bugs, and made steady improvements in performance and the handling of specific emails and mail servers. And we've been making frequent releases, roughly every week. If you're using these weekly updates, you might not necessarily see so much difference between versions, depending of course on your particular use case. But believe me when I say that we are not sitting still :)

Anyhow, there are a couple of problems we're looking into now:

• first, performance problems with really big folders (ie., many thousands of mails). We're trying to come up with a solution, but it's not easy (as is the case with most interesting things in life). Please bear with us;
  
• second, problems with specific servers. Here you can help us! We're testing modest with different POP/IMAP/SMTP servers. But, there are many more different ones in the world, with a wide variety of versions, configurations - a combinatorial explosion. If your server doesn't play nice with modest, please file bugs with all the details (server, version, configuration,...). Also, protocol traces or PCAP-files (tcpdump/wireshark) are very useful, as are test accounts. Remember, if we cannot reproduce it, we probably can't fix it. If there's information you don't want to share with bugs.maemo.org, you may also mail me directly. That does require you to trust me, though.
  
• finally, we've seen some problems with rare emails not being shown correctly. Again, if you get such an email, please file a bug, and attach the email (after stripping it of any privacy-sensitive information of course).
  

Anyhow, for the large majority of users, modest seems to be working quite nicely; if you haven't tried it yet, I invite you to give modest a try, and tell us what you think.

I just discovered a new application called MaemoPublishr, which will let you select images from your tablet and upload to Flickr or Picasa. What I like is that you can select all your option pre-upload - much like tools I’ve got on the desktop side of things, but this seems to be the first on the tablet.

The only requirement is python and the download is a straight .deb.

Technorati Tags:
Flickr, Internet Tablet, Maemo, Picasa

Vegas!

Registration and settling in done. Updating from a solo dinner at the hotel. Lot of stuff on flickr and one new Qik.

And I'm not talking about vodka this time, but instead about the latest internet tablet from Nokia, the N810. I've now had the device for some weeks, and it has really started to replace the laptop in many situations.

The idea of an universal communicator is a mobile device that can be used to connect with various communication networks including telephone, instant messaging and social networks. After the latest Internet Communications Software Update, the N810 fits the description quite well:

• Small and portable, fits a jacket pocket
• Keyboard for reasonably fast text messaging
• Skype for voice calls and keeping in touch with friends and family abroad
• Support for various instant messaging networks like Jabber / Google Talk, MSN, AIM, ...
• SIP voice-over-IP calling support
• Mauku for staying in touch with my Jaiku contacts
• Modest, a really neat mobile email client
• Mozilla-based web browser for the rest
• Multi-colour LED for alerting me when new messages arrive
• MaemoPlazer updates my location to the blog automatically

And did I mention it looks really nice?

The latest software releases mean that I've been able to remove Adium and Skype from my MacBook, and Pidgin from the device, and just use the tablet's native communications tools. This means a lot fewer interruptions when I'm working and easy mobile access to all my instant messaging and email conversations.

Of course, things could be improved even further. Here are my wish list items for future software updates:

• More consistent scrolling (preferably inertial and with thumb-friendly scrollbar) in different apps (#2564)
• SMS support for the instant messaging application through the bluetooth-tethered mobile phone (#2725)
• Ability to act as bluetooth headset for the tethered mobile phone (see ITT)
• A2DP support for wireless stereo headsets (#667)
• GeoClue so position-aware apps can also work indoors (when GPS is not available) (#2037)
• ZeroConf support so Mac (and other) computers discoverable as ".local" become available (#73)
• Video calls with Skype would make the device much more personal

Anyway, this is a big step from the OS2007 and N800 days!

Updated 2008-01-12: Added notes on MaemoPlazer and need for Skype cam calls.

Technorati Tags: jabber, jaiku, maemo, n810, skype, sip

I grilled Victor Brilon for a good half hour about the tablets, history, and roadmap. I voice recorded it bu will post a transcript later. Stay tuned!

Hello!



A while ago, I seem to remember writing a nice little article telling about how wonderful running KDE on my N770 was. (And, it was). But now, well, this is just amazing.



All in all, the N810 packs more than twice as much power as the N770 and Penguinbait's optimized 2008 port of KDE is simply astounding. KDE runs like it would on a laptop. I'm really not exaggerating. And, to boot, on the N810, I was able to install it on the internal memory card. (I didn't use those maps, anyway.) Eh, I got too excited waiting for the mini SD card to come in from Amazon, so I just decided to try it out. :D



What is also simply brilliant is that this version of KDE comes with an office suite and the ability to print to a networked printer BUILT IN. Pb has included CUPS and Koffice with the package and it is wonderful. Simply wonderful. I have been able to use the N810 as a real laptop replacement. (My Vaio's keyboard died, so I'm typing this on my stowaway bluetooth keyboard, in KDE, on my N810) ;-)

You can grab KDE for the Tablets at it's new, official (and very incomplete, so far) home. TabletHacker.com

The discount codes are finally activated on the Danish Nokia direct shop, so I have now ordered my new N810 tablet. It should be here in a few days time. I can hardly wait

Hello, hello!



Well, in this, the latest and greatest release of PyAno, the latency issues and the key space issue has been solved. (Thanks to some great help!) No more damnedable delayed notes! So, here's the download.

PyAno is released under the GNU GPL:
Version 0.2 of Pyano.deb

In mid December I realized that it would be really helpful to know what exactly is going on with my Maemo repositories. So I decided to have a special webalizer only for the Maemo repository (I have a global webalizer for the whole domain). After looking at the stats I regret that I didn't do this right from the start.

Some interesting observations so far

Most people already download Maemo 4.x (Chinook) packages
last 12 days of December => 1.7 GB packages

I wouldn't have guessed that so many people already run Chinook in December (maybe only the super hard core early adapters use my stuff).

See the for yourself: MUlliNER.ORG Maemo Repository Stats

Btw: Many people ask me about ipHome applet (shows IP address on home screen). I'm going to release it as soon as I have my N810. I know this is not nice :-P

I really should limit my posts per day... (So much interesting activity, though!)

In the last week or so I've set up multiple scratchbox environments to develop for OS2008; the laptop, desktop, work pc, friends laptop and finally a spare workhorse in the corner that I use when I need spare CPU cycles. But it seems to me that although Nokia has made it easier to install, it can still be a little confusing for somebody new to the platform (I hate to use the term newbie). So below, in response to this, you can find a line by line install guide for OS2008. I've suppressed the output that you could expect from each command to make it more readable but suffice to say that if you can't figure out a 'Y/n' prompt (such as the Nokia disclaimer) maybe the OS2008 development environment isn't for you. Anyway here goes ...

In your home directory:


wget http://repository.maemo.org/stable/4.0/maemo-scratchbox-install_4.0.sh
chmod +x maemo-scratchbox-install_4.0.sh
sudo ./maemo-scratchbox-install_4.0.sh -d

... after lots of apt-get goodness:

sudo /scratchbox/sbin/sbox_adduser USERNAME yes

Replace USERNAME with your own regular login username.

Reload the groups information using:

newgrp sbox

Then:

wget http://repository.maemo.org/stable/4.0/maemo-sdk-install_4.0.sh
chmod +x maemo-sdk-install_4.0.sh
./maemo-sdk-install_4.0.sh

Accept the licensing agreement.


sudo nano /scratchbox/etc/nsswitch.conf

Comment out the hosts line and replace it with just files and dns as so:

hosts: files dns

Then:

/scratchbox/login
nano /etc/resolv.conf

Change the name server to your own nameserver/gateway which in my case (a Sky UK router) was 192.168.0.1

Then do:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-update

In a separate normal terminal window (non-scratchbox root) type:


sudo apt-get install xserver-xephyr

If you have problems make sure that in synaptic package manager->settings->repositories->Third Party Software all boxes are ticked.

Do a:


Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac

This will make sure that the Xephyr install works. You should have a 800x480 window with a black and white cross hatch on it.



Finally, in the scratchbox window type:

export DISPLAY=:2
af-sb-init.sh start

and you should see the following screen:



Congratulations.

Nokia hasn't made it too easy to set up a development environment for the tablets but maybe thats to do with Darwin's theory of evolution ;) Have fun and let me know if this helps you.

Edited: Thanks for the comments :)

In case you missed it, I had a brief hands-on video with the Sony Mylo com2 on UltraMobileGeek.com. The mylo (Intentional lowercase portmanteau for "My Life Online") spec sheet sounds familiar.

• 800x480 touchscreen
• Sliding backlit keyboard
• Linux based core
• Widget interface with quick links to Facebook and YouTube
• WiFi, and Skype, but not a phone

The mylo is going after the 13-18 market. It is more durable than the N810 and thicker. There will be no "open" Linux access to it and no development kit (as per Sony's reps on site.)

Even so ... I want to put this one through the paces. I want to see what they did right and wrong on it and give my comparative experience with other devices. I am glad to see the original mylo plans in the trash and was impressed with how far they have come. In a battle between the Nokia N810 and the mylo COM2, it's a race to see if a device with an expensive development and marketing budget can battle a device with hundreds of third party apps and an SDK.

Ok, quite a long time since my last post! But new year brought me some good news. I finally got my coupon working and received the N810 (woah!) and moved from the N800+E90 duo to N810+N95-8GB. I’ve been playing around with N810 in the past two days and, yes, I’ve to confess that I’m pretty [...]

So for all those that don't know yet, WeBot is a media streaming application in the same vein as Orb from Orb networks. It allows you share your media over the internet and stream it to any web capable device. At the moment you can only stream photos and music but it looks like video capabilities are on their way.

So what makes WeBot special? Well I'm glad you ask. WeBot has gone out of its way to accommodate the Nokia Internet Tablets in particular, creating an interface especially for them.



To run WeBot under Linux you need java installed. For Ubuntu the following command should suffice:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

Accept the the blurb and you should be ready to go. Sign up and download the WeBot tar.gz at http://www.webot.com and unzip it to its target directory. Then just run the webot.sh file:

./webot.sh

This will start the bot.

You need to add directories to the bot in a fully capable web browser (read desktop browser) which you can do by logging in to the WeBot website and selecting the 'cog' icon at the top.



Once you are happy that you have setup the media you want to share the next step is to log in to the WeBot website on the Internet Tablet. This is where you will see the custom interface designed especially for the Nokia IT's. You can stream music or even browse your image collection.



Thoughfix did a great video at CES for his TabletBlog site which shows WeBot's soon to be implemented feature of streaming video to the Nokia N810. This can be seen below.



WeBot isn't without its problems. There are a few user interface issues with the Nokia tablets and it can be pretty slow to buffer songs before they are played but I'm sure when this software is finally released these issues will be solved.

WeBot is certainly one to look out for in the future.

Right after a few hours of use, web browser on N810 became pretty slow while loading, hanging for about 10 seconds while launching (Bug 2753). I had the same problem on N800, but I thought it was because of my experiments ;). But now I am on a fresh install. I’m still trying to trace [...]

I finally got my N810 and I’m really pleased with it. It looks nice, feels nice and works like a charm. Thanks Nokia.

However, there’s one thing that puzzles me. Why can’t you force the brightness of the screen to go to maximum. Even if you set the screen brightness to it’s max, it still goes brighter when the light sensor on the upper-left corner of the device detects a bright light. This can be demonstrated for example with a flashlight.

I understand that it saves energy, and there’s the added feel of readability in bright light, but still it would be nice to have a checkbox in display settings for the adaptive display functionality.

What do you think, or have I missed something?

I’ve been trying to test the GPS on my newly-arrived N810. So far I have not succeeded in getting a fix from my window. Time-To-First-Fix while walking outside (with very good view of the sky) has been 5-10 minutes.

This is not what I had been hoping for. It seems I’ll still be carrying an external GPS with me, at least sometimes — just like like I have to carry a camera with me if I want to take half decent photos, even though my phone has two cameras in it. Good gadgets seem to be difficult to make. Good convergence gadgets are still, in my opinion, mostly an unproven theory.

Otherwise I’m very satisfied with the device: it feels really solid, and I’m still amazed how they fit the keyboard into a device smaller than the N800.

Not SiRF III? 

Anyway, about the GPS: There were rumours around the internet that the chipset is SiRF III, but this does not seem to be the case. Internettablettalk forum member ag2 found this string in /usr/sbin/gpsdriver:

GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GPS5300GP

GPS5300 is a gps-on-a-chip for OMAP based phones from Texas Instruments. From their product brochure (emphasis mine):

The GPS5300 NaviLink 4.0 solution enables a rapid time to first fix (TTFF) from weak satellite signals… .

Questions:

• Can someone confirm the chipset details?
• Assuming we do have a GPS5300 on the tablets, does “rapid” have an alternate meaning in Dallas? Maybe it’s just that everything is bigger there, even time-to-first-fix.

Hello, hello! (I am so glad I got this bluetooth keyboard! I won't be doing very long posts or coding for a while because my laptop's keyboard and track pad are completely dead... Good thing for my tablet, though.)



As luck may have it, I stumbled across some more wonderful backgrounds for my Tablet! These are from GreyGhost at the ITT forums. Be sure to leave a comment or just a thank you for GG if you decide to use them!

Here They Are!

I haven't been writing about new features of Midgard for the last 3 weeks, but it's high time to stop write about new ones and instead write about new upcoming releases ( which I am tuning recently ). So I tested and built release packages wherever I could, including maemo scratchbox. Unfortunatelly I found python-midgard package buggy... so I took a closer look at python, and here's what I found:

ls -l /usr/bin/python*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    9 Feb 11  2007 /usr/bin/python -> python2.4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 3384 Jun 14  2006 /usr/bin/python2.4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  119 Jun 14  2006 /usr/bin/python2.4-pyrexc

Ok, nothing unusual, right? python command is just a symlink to python2.4. Which is cool of course, isn't it?

But strace wrote weird logs so I decided to check python version:

/usr/bin/python2.4 -V
Python 2.4.2
/usr/bin/python -V
Python 2.3.4

Please, please tell me why the hell command invoked via symlink returns different version.

I haven't been writing about new features of Midgard for the last 3 weeks, but it's high time to stop write about new ones and instead write about new upcoming releases ( which I am tuning recently ). So I tested and built release packages wherever I could, including maemo scratchbox. Unfortunatelly I found python-midgard package buggy... so I took a closer look at python, and here's what I found:

ls -l /usr/bin/python*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    9 Feb 11  2007 /usr/bin/python -> python2.4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 3384 Jun 14  2006 /usr/bin/python2.4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  119 Jun 14  2006 /usr/bin/python2.4-pyrexc

Ok, nothing unusual, right? python command is just a symlink to python2.4. Which is cool of course, isn't it?

But strace wrote weird logs so I decided to check python version:

/usr/bin/python2.4 -V
Python 2.4.2
/usr/bin/python -V
Python 2.3.4

Please, please tell me why the hell command invoked via symlink returns different version.

Finally I ordered a Nokia N810 with my discount code provided by the Maemo project on Tuesday. It arrived Thursday. With all my tenseness and pleasant anticipation, it looked and felt great while having a quick glance. But the disenchantment followed right away:

Just a quick note to let you know that we have an N810, the N800 is updated to OS 2008, and the new tutorials are now in production. We've been crawling all over the N810 to find out more about it, and here are some initial thoughts: The N800 and N810 really are the same One of the first things we did with the N810 was run it alongside the updated N800. We couldn't find any major differences

The same rfc2047 decoder fixes that Jeffrey did for upstream Camel are of course ported to Tinymail’s parsing code. So E-mail clients like Modest will also parse those broken E-mails correctly (once you update your Modest packages on your Nokia devices, of course).

Of course are Nokia’s testers testing the application with such broken E-mails. We are indeed seeing that more E-mails can be displayed correctly with Jeffrey’s new rfc2047 decoder. Usually spam succeeds more often now. Legitimate E-mails are less frequently broken. I guess spammers want to fool weak rfc2047 decoder implementations in spam detection softwares.

For the last few weeks I have been synchronizing the embedded Camel of Tinymail with Camel upstream. Other than bringing upstream’s bugfixes to Tinymail, this will of course make it more easy to port features back to Camel upstream. I must stress again that a lot of the new features are specific for mobile use cases and that a lot of them are not done in such a way that they can easily be ported. Others are simply not very interesting for a desktop E-mail client, and some are.

I've just sent an email to maemo-developers asking for feedback on an idea:

RFC: Proposal to solve multiple repository, poor QA situation

There is an increasingly acute problem with the Internet Tablets, the number of repositories a user has to install to correctly get some software is growing. It has been regularly discussed on maemo-dev that the best thing to have would be for all packages to be in extras - especially since in OS2008 it is now included by default (albeit disabled).

I fear that the gronmayer.com database of repositories - no matter how useful it is - will only exacerbate the situation.

What I'm suggesting is an easy way for developers to upload to extras, with a group of volunteers doing the legwork of signing and uploading the packages, doing quality assurance and so on.

This should make it easier for developers (no need to have their own repos any more), and easier for users since they'll only need to enable the extras repository and know that none of the software in there will brick their device, be uninstallable etc.

The QA will also allow users to use the categories of the Application Manager more, as the gatekeepers will strictly limit the categories that are used by the packages flowing through them.

Of course, this system will be voluntary: I'm in no position to dictate that everyone use it, but hopefully there'll be sufficient benefits to everyone to make it a viable scheme.

ScummVM 0.11 is near. Yesterday it was tagged in SVN and release will be any day. Good news is that Maemo port is now committed to scumvm SVN and will be part of official 0.11.0 source (once it is available). It still is a bit dirty so most of it is committed as a single patch file living in platform specific directory but it is a start. Making it more clean is work for 0.12. Basically it depends on having generic configurable keymapper (preferably with GUI) for all engines and platforms.

You can get the binary compiled from 0.11 SVN branch here
http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/scummvm_0.11.0-0_armel.deb
Please test it if you can and report issues to this ITT thread. This becomes the official release version if no serious bug is found. I will replace 0.10 version in extras repository and downloads.maemo.org when 0.11 is officially released at www.scummvm.org. You can see what's new here. Maemo port keybindings were added only for Lure of the Temptress.

As some of you might have noticed, I've started to divide each one of my blog entries into multiple logical entries. This is to allow the readers of my blog to be able to filter my blog better. For example, some reader might be interesting in my opinion on UPnP but not on the death of Benazir Bhutto.

From the start of 2008, I've been promoted to the role of Lead Developer/Architect in a new team (same organisation, same company). Although I need to prove myself before this appointment is made permanent, I am hoping I'll make it through.

From the start of 2008, I've been promoted to the role of Lead Developer/Architect in a new team (same organisation, same company). Although I need to prove myself before this appointment is made permanent, I am hoping I'll make it through.

Since my sister was staying at London for a few days on her way back from Pakistan to Canada, I arrived at London around the same time to meet her and her family after 4 years or so. I hung around with her family and some relatives of my brother-in-law for the first 3 days in London and Oxford. The last day, I spent at Cambridge.

Mostly it was nice and fun but there were some things that just didn't seem right. It was quite hard to adapt to the "separate water taps for hot and cold water" system of theirs and the fact that you hardly get any water out of the shower when you want warm rather than cold water. I wonder why they take 90€ for a visit visa. Also! I thought Ansku was over-exaggerating when she used to tell me that pubs in Britain close at 11pm but to my surprise We were kicked out of the pub in Cambridge before we could finish our first pint. Err.. Then people say why would someone want to move to Finland.

Recently the c't magazine mentioned our dear GUPnP project and published some pictures of my UI (I am hoping to see it tomorrow *if* Stefan remembers to bring it to office). That resulted in at least one person getting interested in our project. AFAIK, everything worked out of the box on his Fedora Core 6 but he was unable to see anything in any of the client-side tools. After a few mails and some help from Christian, it turned out to be the default firewall settings on fedora.

If you have been looking for a better reason to go all the way to Brussels to attend FOSDEM, look no further; I'll be presenting GUPnP there. :)

I was playing around with gps-software on the N810 and decided to try how hard it would be to make a simple perl-script that uses the gpsd on OS2008. As a side note: I really don’t know perl at all, and don’t even like it - I actually hate it for some reason…

I decided to go with Charles Curleys gpsdate-script that uses gpsd to show the UTC time from the satellites. I hoped it would be a simple task, but actually I had to resolve some dependency issues. Seven to be exact.

To get this script working, I had to get additional perl modules, distributions and whatnot, but it was quite simple by searching and downloading in search.cpan.org. I probably could have used perls automatic download functionality, but even if I could, I didn’t want to fill my devices innards with endless perl-libraries. I wanted some control. I just downloaded these “packages” and used the -I/lib/dir/here switch:

• GPS-PRN
• Geo-Constants
• Geo-Ellipsoids
• Geo-Functions
• Geo-Forward
• Geo-Inverse
• Net-GPSD

One might argue that I could have gotten to the same outcome by not using Net-GPSD and it’s dependencies, but I think that by going this route there’s more functionality available for future fiddling.

I modified the original source by removing some command-line argument handling to get rid of Getopt::Std. So this is a dirty hack all around

To make it work, make sure gpsd is running (by starting maps for instance) and run the script from console:

/media/mmc2/tmp/gpsdate $ perl -I./includes gpsdate.pl
/gpsdate.pl: It is 22:31:30.00, 2008-01-14, UTC.

You can download the modified script and the dependencies here.

I'm holding back on purpose. I am trying make sure all my ducks are in a row between PR information, tech specs, press releases, and actual on-site discussion before I post my big CES follow-ups.

If you're starving for content, I've been posting a few things over there on ultramobilegeek. Expect the Nokia interview up this week as well as some more on that cute little thing called WeBot.

Hello,

This is my first blog entry on this blog, let me introduce myself first: 

I am a Maemo Chief Engineer at Forum Nokia. I have been working with maemo since Nokia 770. I have long history of open source projects, first ones were bios, debuggers and RTOS drivers for 8 bit 6809 and 16/32 bit 68xxx series and after that I have followed the development closely. I have also made several Linux device drivers and the Katix real time operating system which is used on embedded protocol gateways. At the moment I have in garage.maemo.org internet tablet based katix-efis and enginemonitor projects for small aircraft and X-plane flight simulator. I have also other infinity-project to make tablet and openwrt based home automation system.

Forum Nokia is Nokia developers' organization, offering technical and marketing support, tools and documentation to developers.

I am dedicated Linux-user, gadget-lover (there are so many Nokia 770s, N800s, N810s and other cool gadgets along with computers (most of them running Linux and the rest running MacOSX Leopard), etc. in our household) we have two cats and a dog and I fly small aircraft as a hobby. If it is about some cool new gadget, I most likely know about it, or already have it :).

I will publish in this blog maemo related news, interesting issues and also maemo related hints and small tutorials.

Kate

 

To replace the somewhat chaotic keyword system, we've introduced a human-edited contents page of all the tutorials on the site. You can access it by clicking on the link on the right, under the title "Tutorials by Category". The first item of the index is a brand new article, a general introduction to the concept behind the Internet Tablets and what they can do. Obviously most of you won't need

To get the most out of this tutorial, watch the video above and then read the text below. The tutorial assumes that N800 owners have upgraded to OS 2008. If you want to find out more about upgrading, click here. If you want to comment on this tutorial, please post in the comments section at the end. If you have any questions or problems regarding your tablet, please post about them on Internet

Well, if I was slow with the last release, at least I can do better with this one. There was a new kernel update in this release but my patches applied fine and the resulting image checks out on n800. As before, I have no idea how well the high speed mode interacts with the eMMC inside the n810 and I’m afraid I still have no idea when I’ll be able to check that out; I’m in the US - where we’re lucky enough to have to deal with a web store which doesn’t accept the maemo discount codes and their out of stock anyway. *sigh* It would be nice if someone from Nokia could comment on this mess.

Anyway, you can grab the kernel binary and patches from here. Enjoy!

If like me you are unfortunate enough to have to work with Microsoft Outlook and a Windows based mobile smart phone for work, then syncing with GPE-Cal on a Nokia Internet Tablet seems like a tall order. In fact its not that difficult; you just need to know how to 'glue' the bits together.

First off the easy part. Thanks to David Hautbois and his excellent Erminig maemo program for the Internet Tablets you can sync GPE-Cal with Google calendar. From here you need some way of syncing Google calendar with Outlook. For this another bit of programming glue is needed.



GSyncit by David Levinson is a small windows based program which installs itself into Outlooks toolbar and enables you to sync Google calendar with Outlook. The free version has a nag screen and allows you to sync one calendar but the full version only costs $9.99 and is well worth it if you need this functionality.

From there Microsoft's active sync takes over and sync's with the mobile smart phone.

Quite a long way around but in the end you have the holy grail of calendar synchronization.

I am still transcribing the half-hour interview with Victor Brilon of Nokia. In the meantime, people are still asking these questions and I still do not have answers. I do not have answers to the reader questions below (in bold.) Anyone want to chime in with more?

1. WiMAX Internet Tablet: When and how much?
2. OS2008 Blogger Client: Can we have one? (I was wrong in a previous article, thinking one existed. I wouldn't mind one.)
   
3. Desktop Client Software: Can we have some sort of desktop media management and bookmark management software?
4. Sprint, XOHM, Clearwire, and WiMAX carriers. This one will always be "No Comment" from Nokia. They have a WiMAX roadmap but can't talk about the carriers' roadmaps.
5. What does Nokia think about the Mylo 2? Heh - they can't answer this one either.
6. What's Nokia's response to the infrastructure problems during the OS2008 release? I asked that of another friend at Nokia and the response was more emoted than verbalized. Suffice to say a lesson was learned. I hope eventually some public comment comes out of this.
7. What's up with the N810's GPS lock-on time? When I had an N810 in my hands, I noticed that the first few times the GPS was used were terrible. Over time, it got better. Maybe it learns? I don't know.
   
8. Any plans on haptic feedback on upcoming models? I hadn't considered this myself. I should've asked.
9. What was going on in that WeBot demo? I am trying to find out that whole set-up and how it worked.

Again - the stuff in bold are the questions I have heard to which I DO NOT HAVE THE ANSWERS. The text afterward is my commentary on it. I am posting this here to acknowledge that I know the questions, am interested in finding the answers, and am trying to hunt down the right people.

p.s. Apparently Apple announced their new "supermodel" laptop. By "supermodel," I mean "slower than average, does less than average, anorexic, and overpriced but DAMN - you wouldn't mind playing with it for a while anyway."

Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16th to 19th of March at Summerville Beach Resort. The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.

Let's go! We're waiting for you.

Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org .

If you didn't have the privilege of joining our Bossa Conference last year, now is your chance. It was the first INdT sponsored conference on Mobile / Open Source Software and it was a huge success.



To quote some of our attendances:

"The best Open Source conference I had the pleasure of attending."
Zack Rusin
KDE/MESA/Gollium3D

"The Bossa Conference was an awesome event. For me it was the best open source conference in 2007. Don't miss the next one..."
Marcel Holtmann
Bluez Maintainer

"Sand, sun and small devices. BOSSA was the perfect conference to discuss the future of Linux on embedded platforms."
John 'J5' Palmieri
Red Hat/OLPC/DBus

"Best conference I've ever been to. DON'T miss this one."
Carsten 'Rasterman' Haltzler
OpenMoko/Enlightenment



To sum up: Bossa Conference '08

Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16th to 19th of March at Summerville Beach Resort (www.summervilleresort.com.br). The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.

Let's go! We're waiting for you.


Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org.

I’ve got a new laptop for doing Maemo-stuff and installing it didn’t really work out of the box (when it does?). I had problems with setting up the hardware accelerated X on Ubuntu (for IBM/Lenovo T61p, which has nVidia Quadro chipset, the latest nVidia driver from nvidia site was required), the nVidia installer worked, and compiled the kernel module, but the nv module was insisting back on each reboot (and only way to start X was to kill the safe-mode thingie, log in as root, execute /etc/init.d/gdm stop, run nVidia installer again (it took long time because it first tried to search compatible kernel module from nVidia site, but couldn’t found, and then compiled the module), and then do /etc/init.d/gdm start).

After quite inconveniently booting the machine several times up (needing to do the long task mentioned above), I decided to get help.
I got some help from Rodrigo Novo, and I decided to write a to document what was done. You can read it here: http://www.karoliinasalminen.com/blog/?page_id=258.
After some fighting with the stubborn Ubuntu, it agreed that ok, lets collaborate. HW accelerated X is runnign nicely now! Thanks Rodrigo!

I have set up development environment (gcc, g++, automake, gtk+, glib, …) and now it is the turn to install scratchbox and Chinook on it. I just did it on my old computer so, it’ll be quite painless I would expect.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for OS2008 software that I was using on my N800, and last night I just saw that Subversion is now available. That’s a killer bit of software for me. I use my own svn repository to sync up the stuff I’m working on, keep notes and little scripts, etc. The N810 (now with hardware keyboard) I expected to be killer for little bits of hackery here and there. And it has been, just getting the stuff onto and off the device hasn’t been as braindead as I had hoped. Now it is. Can world domination be far behind? I expect not.

I haven’t quite made it to the point of keeping everything in Subversion. But enough stuff is creeping in that direction that I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea to give it another try.

This guy from Igalia has the new Air laptop thing already, go check it out!

Video by this guy.

Ferenc Szekely has just posted an explanation of what went wrong with the firmware and repository downloads over the holiday period on the Maemo developer list.

"The infrastructure is built so that the content from repository.maemo.org is served thru a huge caching network. We were supposed to use the same network for the firmware downloads as well, but due to a misconfiguration and _my negligence_ all the requests ended up at our origin server (stage.maemo.org).

Soon after the N810 launch the traffic dramatically increased and the server could not handle it anymore. It was actually never meant to handle such load."

Read it all at:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2008-January/013972.html

I just wanted to share the knowledge that as long as you are running the same OS on both, OS2008, restoring from an N800 to an N810 works great.

root@ian-laptop:/usr/local# svn checkout http://test.kernel.org/svn/autotest/trunk autotest
Checked out revision 1111.

I've been running hardy (the upcoming ubuntu LTS release) for a while now. After a kernel update, I noticed I couldn't build any packages anymore due to configure failing when checking if built binaries could be run. A bit of log reading, the error seemed to be: "mmap: permission denied", hmm.

The configure test there should be fairly trivial, but just to be sure, I made a little test program and compiled it. The compiler works just fine but the produced binary gave the same mmap-error, so it seemed the arm emulation was broken. After stracing the binary a bit, I saw that it tried to do mmap(..., 4096, ...), which failed.

The error appeared after a kernel upgrade, so I tried to find something related to mmap in /proc, and find did give me /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr, which had 65536 in it. Running sudo sh -c 'echo 4096 > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr' was my first instinct and it did indeed fix the problem -- any larger value and the problem resurfaced.

So, if you're running ubuntu hardy (or linux 2.6.24(?)), you might hit this problem; and lowering the mmap_min_addr should help.

A new release of PyMaemo is available. This one includes bugfixes, new packages (setuptools, pyopenssl and python-sdk) and a lot of updates. In order to clean Application Manager programs list, python packages without GUI doesn't show up in AM list anymore. It will be only installed as a dependency of other packages or via command line. To do the update you can use the ".install" files from Maemo downloads website or use apt from command line.

I haven't posted a new poll for a few weeks now, but the results are in. The question:

Do you use Linux on devices other than on the Internet Tablet? The answers:
Yes, for workstations and laptops 247 (70%) Yes, for servers and network appliances 182 (52%) Yes, for other embedded devices 117 (33%) No 68 (19%)
There are a LOT more workstation Linux users here than I thought! Overall, 81% of respondents said that they use Linux on some other form of machine. Neat!

Next poll: One of my stops at CES was at RealNetworks. I am sure we've all tried the Rhapsody client (link goes to press release) for access to the entire Rhapsody library on the Nokia Internet Tablets. If you haven't tried it: Go ahead. The tablets include a trial of the software with full access to their online library.

I didn't get to talk directly with the product rep who deals with the N800/N810 but his associate passed along my question: Can we use Rhapsody for offline playback on the Internet Tablets? He replied to me and, while he loves his own personal N800, there is no offline playback available. RealNetworks has partnerships with others for devices that allow both streaming AND offline playback (see the Haier ibiza) so the business model is not foreign to them.

To get this to work on the Internet Tablets means a DRM module would have to be put on to the tablet. What I (and I am sure RealNetworks) want to know: Would you subscribe to Rhapsody if it allowed offline playback on the Internet Tablet?

Answers:

• Yes. Having both online and offline media libraries are worth $12.99/mo.
• Yes. I am already a Rhapsody subscriber anyway and this would be good.
• No. I don't want to pay for a subscription music library.
• No. I don't use my tablet for music.
• No. I am morally opposed to DRM in any kind.

As usual, the poll is located in the right bar of TabletBlog.com. Let me know your thoughts and I'll pass them along to RealNetworks!

As someone somewhere pointed out a long ago, the osso-xterm/vte show bold black as black, not as "bright black". I finally fixed this and new vte is now in repos for mistral, bora and chinook. Currently there's no way to pull this via UI (and OS2008 wouldn't allow it anyway) so if you want it, you need to use some apt-magic.

Obligatory updated screen shot:

Updating the firmware on the Nokia N800 Updating the firmware on the Nokia N810 To get the most out of this tutorial, watch the video above and then read the text below. If you want to comment on this tutorial, please post in the comments section at the end. If you have any questions or problems regarding your tablet, please post about them on Internet Tablet Talk's Newbie Forum. What is

A few days back there was great a blog post by linuxuk.org about syncing GPE Calendar with Google calendar and further with Outlook.

I wanted to try just the GPE Calendar to Google synchronization on OS2008 , and realised that it needed some fiddling to get it working. Here are the steps:

1. Find and decide where to get GPE Calendar from. I ended up using repository:
   http://www.cobb.uk.net/apt/ chinook user

2. Then there’s the libsoup dependency. This I achieved by using repository:
   http://maemo.o-hand.com/packages/ chinook/ [empty]

3. Install GPE Calendar from application manager.
4. Install some python dependencies from the root terminal:
   apt-get install python2.5 python2.5-gtk2 python2.5-hildon python2.5-xml

5. Follow the erminig instructions by downloading and istalling gdatalite, pysqlite and erminig.
6. Remeber that when entering Google calendar password in erminig, the first letter wants to be uppercase. The program won’t tell you if you have a wrong password. sigh…

It’s a long list, but when you get it to work, you’ll be happy. It works just fine. If it doesn’t, remember to try to start it from the terminal to see the output.

Most of the problems I figured out by reading the erminig forum, and the repositories I found from the repository search tool. If you have better instructions or tips please share them in the comments.

Continuing my previous GStreamer introduction this new tutorial will guide you on your first GStreamer application written in C. For anxious people the code is here. The whole thing is here. It’s in bluwiki so if you want to modify it, feel free to do so I feel a little bit ashamed of posting such simple things, [...]

A BBC article is reporting how cell phones have become ubiquitous in the developing world, and how they instead of "regular" computers will be the communications, learning and business platform in many of those regions.

If I had told you ten years ago that by the end of 2007 there would be an international network of wirelessly-connected computers throughout the developing world, you might well have said it wasn't possible.

...

But regardless of where the developer is located, I think it's time that we recognised that for the majority of the world's population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album, and many other things, just as soon as someone, somewhere, sits down and writes the software that allows these functions to be performed.

To make software in this space, simple, mobile technologies are the ones that matter. This means SMS-based information retrieval, mobile (or multi-platform using detectors like WURFL to morph the UI) web applications, inter-application communication techniques like XMPP, P2P architectures, and hopefully open platforms like GNOME Mobile and Android will be where the action is.

It is also important to get rid of the "you're never offline" mindset. We're talking about a world where network or power outages are frequent and data transfer fees can be high. So good offline access to data is mandatory, although constrained by the potentially small (but growing!) storage space of cell phones.

See my "Solving the logistics of Mamona" and "The World's Internet Tablet?" posts, and the Midgard positioning related to this.

Via Boing Boing Gadgets.

Technorati Tags: android, future, p2p, maemo, sms, xmpp

If you ever wanted to have an overview of the maemo software, now there is an easy way. I'm proud to promote the new Maemo technology overview. (HTML version here). Even if you are not a developer, or you are too busy to scan through the entire maemo.org, or you are a strategist and want to understand if maemo could provide something for your company this is a place to go.

More detailed stuff can be found e.g. from here under application and platform development ... more for developers then ...

(this was a paid advertisement)

In last two weeks I was testing a GPS device that I bought to use with maemo-mapper on my inter-states trips.

Here in my city (Curitiba – Paraná – Brazil), maemo-mapper works very well…. My car is always in the route ( a green line in maemo-mapper ), I know perfectly where streets are, and I know exactly where take the exits on the highways. But Curitiba is a big and important city, so I decided to test it in Londrina – PR.

Londrina is a little country tow here in Paraná, but probably is the second more important city in my state. Anyway, how I was saying writing before, GoogleMaps is so faw away to be precise in Londrina. Take a look in the photo below:

The red line is what my car was doing and the green line is what GoogleStreetMaps was telling me to do.

Now I know; it’s not a Google’s problem, but it’s a MapLink problem. Maplink is the company who provides street-maps to google in Brazil.

Anyway, on this situation, I can’t trust in maemo advises anymore. Google’s way points doesn’t work anymore. So I decide to fix this problem writing a “mapper-calibration” feature inside maemo-mapper. And its ready now.

Go to “Menu/Maps/Map Calibrate“. After that, just click in a point that you think you really are.

I sugest you to stop your car in some corner, find this corner in mapper, and click on it. It’ll be more precise.

And the result will be something like that:

Há! Much better now!

I don’t know if this problem happens in another countries too, but if you think that this feature is interesting to you, you can download the patch here, or get the compiled package. (2008-version only, sorry folks)

Just remember to disable this feature when you don’t need it. =)

So, on the next weekend I’ll be in Sorocaba testing this feature. Then I’ll describe if this is useful.

So, nice weekend for everyone!

Bye!

[update: 19/01/2008] BTW, I was forgotting. Maemo-Mapper is very well developed. They have a nice (and interesting) unit-system, so its very easy to transform pixels into latitude/longitude and vice versa. Congratulations Maemo-Mapper’s Team!

It's been one and a half weeks since I got my N810 and I had some time to play around with most of its features.

I was able to package Erlang for X86 target but collided with some segfaults on Armel. It seems the problem is the qemu and after a while trying to patch it I gave up for tonight. Have to continue tomorrow night.

Anyhow we aren't that far of getting CouchDB and Ajatus to work natively on Nokia n800/n810...

 

No, there is not a new port (done)! This post is just to address some concerns that have been raised recently.

First of all, I would like to thank some guys who have really helped me with my job: Antonio Gomes (a.k.a tonikitoo) and Tomaz Noleto who taught me how to port the fonts and the Greasemonkey Add-ons. Andre Pedralho who helped me work on the MicroB spell checker, dictionaries and Adblock Plus porting. And finally a special thanks to Wladimir Palant, the Adblock Plus creator and maintainer, who warned me about a security bug in my port and who inspired me on to write this post.

I was informed by Wladimir that some "Adblock Plus for MicroB" users have looked for help in the official ABP forums. Unfortunately he will not help any of those users there. If you have any doubt, suggestion or complaining about any port we have done, you can subscribe yourself to our list, send it to us and we will reply you as soon as we have a good answer.

As Wladimir suggested in Adblock Plus official blog all the ported extensions will be renamed. Actually, the packages name will remain the same, but some configuration files would reference me and/or the guy who performed the porting and the port itself.

I hope to release a new port in the coming weeks. I'm just trying to make it work on the microb-engine (1.0.3-5) available in the maemo repository. I asked Pedralho to test the new port on a newer microb-engine version (1.0.4-5) and it worked fine!

In the course of my normal news research for this blog, I stumbled across this article. Apparently, there's a £30 million universal internet access plan in the works for school children.

Excerpt 1:

The mobile companies set the tone with major announcements to provide mobile devices and platforms for learners. Finnish mobile manufacturer Nokia has teamed up with Sanako, a compatriot education software house, to provide N810 internet tablets to the schools market.

This quote is priceless:

"Handhelds have had a position in education for years," he said. "But restrictions such as costs, technical and input issues have held them back. The N810 can solve this because it's got a large screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, plus stylus and fingernail input and the same browsing experience as you have on your laptop or desktop."

Just last week, I was in conversations with a couple developer friends about how difficult it is to get the N810. Unless purchased from Amazon, it seems all distributors (and even the Nokia developer device program) are hard to get. I joke that Amazon is bribing wholesalers to get a bigger share. Seeing the above news, however, makes it all easier to swallow. I hope all those missing N810 tablets are headed to students who could not afford computers.

Congratulations, Nokia, on making a big move to send the tablets to the education sector. Bravo!

I'm writing an application (more on that sometime soon) using the very nice Ruby bindings for Maemo. I've got some dependencies that are packaged as RubyGems that I wanted to be managed through the Application Manager, so I created some .debs for them. <strike>Here is their temporary home</strike> The rake, hpricot, feed-normalizer, simple-rss, atom and htmlentities gems are available in my repository. I didn't create the rubygems and librubygems packages themselves - I was sent them, but couldn't find them hosted elsewhere.

It took me a little while to suss out how to create the .debs so I've included the steps here in case anyone finds themselves in the same boat. This works for native Ruby gems and compiled C extensions.

1. Install the gem inside Scratchbox. Irritatingly, "gem install example" doesn't always want to do very much, so you may need to dowload the gem file and "gem install example-0.1.gem".
2. Make a new directory with the rubygems-<package>-<version> syntax (the rubygems- prefix seemed to make sense to me): mkdir rubygems-example-0.1</lil>
3. cd rubygems-example-0.1/ ; mkdir gems specifications bin
4. cp -r /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/example-0.1/ gems
5. cp /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications/example-0.1.gemspec specifications/
6. cp /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/example bin/ (if there are any bins)
7. Create a Makefile with this content (you will need to replace the spaces at the start of the lines with tabs):

   all:
   clean:
   install:
           mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/
           mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/     <------><------ />

8. dh_make -e you@example.com then choose the type of package.
9. Edit debian/control to suit. Make sure the section is something like user/Utilities, not just Utilities if you want the package to show in the Application Manager.
10. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
11. The parent directory should now contain rubygems-example_0.1-1_armel.deb

As a final note, /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/ may not be in $PATH, so you'll need to deal with that if you have files in bin/.

And so the time has come, almost 1 year since the first Bossa Conference 2007. That was an amazing conference, with exuberant place near the beach, great speakers and lots of time to enjoy both. Since the scope is well defined: Linux and other Free Software in mobile devices, the speakers are really well selected, we could manage to have free time to talk to each other, without going from one side to another, running like crazy and if you have attended conferences before you know what I mean: these casual chats are the best way to know about new features and plans (maybe unofficial or secret ;-)), elaborate new ideas, etc.

That conference was so great that INdT is now promoting another, actually much improved:

Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16th to 19th of March at Summerville Beach Resort. The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.

Let’s go! We’re waiting for you.

Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org.

 

I’m one of the lucky ones, who has recently received a shiny new N810. However, I wanted to write a quick post about the relative merits of each.

N800 N810 No of memory slots 2 (sd/mmc) 1(mini-sd/micro-sd)

Hardware keyboard No Yes

Memory 256Mb 2Gb

Camera 360° Fixed

GPS No Yes

Overall, though there are some aspects of the N810 that I wish they had stuck to on the N800, I’m so pleased with the N810. Maemo-mapper is great with the GPS. Great work Nokia, and the whole of the maemo team, keep it up.

Everyone has heard of stories about hidden messages in songs, many of which could only be heard by playing the record backwards. That was in the vinyl era. CD owners had to rip their songs into wav files and process them with a suitable software tool. For example the manpage of SoX describes its reverse efect as “Reverse the sound sample completely. Included for finding Satanic subliminals”.

Some years ago I was listening to a CD by the Scottish band Urusei Yatsura when I heard the disctintive sound of a ZX Spectrum audio tape in one of its tracks. That sound had already been used several times by some artists (such as Aphex Twin), but this time it was very sharp and sounded like a complete program.

So I loaded it into the emulator and I found a funny satanic message written by the band:

The source code (it was written in BASIC) had some comments, including this one:

What is sadder?
a. Finding this
b. Writing it

For those interested, this message can be found at the beginning of the song “Thank you” from their last album “Everybody loves Urusei Yatsura”.

You can also load this program using a ZX Spectrum emulator. Get the file in TZX format here.

To get the most out of this tutorial, watch the video above and then read the text below. The tutorial assumes that N800 owners have upgraded to OS 2008. If you want to find out more about upgrading your N800, click here. If you want to comment on this tutorial, please post in the comments section at the end. If you have any questions or problems regarding your tablet, please post about them

This is a guest blog by Outi and Jyrki Wahlstedt. I loaned my N800 to them in late December and here they write about their experiences with the device.

Our Internet tablet is present almost imperceptibly in our life from dawn till dusk. It wakes us up in the morning, and tells news in the evening. It is small and stylish, and it mixes well with the environment.

Its utilities include e.g. a browser for surfing the net, Skype for phone calls, and several radios. Its smallness allows it to be enjoyed together, not separately as often happens with our personal computers. Several times a day we look at weather information, and TV programme guides. Also we use it in looking for dogs in need of home, this being the most important project at the moment.

Though its screen is small, the tablet can be used professionally e.g. to monitor large systems with nagios, as the problem components are discernible due to alert colors. This can be handy for remote control.

Skype phone is very easy to use, and we can use it as a speakerphone or with Bluetooth headset. Speakerphone is quite pleasant, as there is no audio feedback from speakers to microphone. Screen quality is good, which enables showing photos as slideshow.

The tablet is easy to use, though there are some difficulties that might be improved in its successor, N810. Screen lock is not very intuitive, the procedure is implemented like in cellphones. In using the screen keyboard it is extremely easy to press <ENTER> and so it is easy to write e.g. an erroneous URL.

Technorati Tags: maemo, n800

Last night I finally was able to do successful packages and installation on my N800.

First set (N800/N810) can be downloaded here: http://protoblogr.net/downloads/erlang/

I'll upload rest of the deps as I get to the office. Also I'm currently buildin ICU which is also needed by CouchDB. Hopefully today I have working native Ajatus on my N800. 

UPDATE: 

Just uploaded rest of the package files. Also there is packages for ICU.
I'm currently trying to get CouchDB to work, but still have some minor problems with it.

For basic usage of erlang one could only install the erlang-base and erlang-nox packages...

Let me introduce Victor Brilon, Sr. Product Manager, Home Networking Solutions, Convergence Products. Wow - that's one long job title. In short, he's responsible for the features of the Internet Tablets related to Home Networking. This puts him right in the thick of things in the Internet Tablet world at Nokia. Since I don't have a picture of him, the photo above shows a typical scene at the Nokia booth at CES. Yes - they were packed.

Thanks to Levi Bard we now have ruby-lightmediascanner, with even API docs!

On the bug fixes front, after Canola2 was released and it was tested with multitude of media I could fix lots of bugs with parsers, mainly on jpeg and id3lib.

Last but not least, thanks to Renato Chencarek we now have ogg support, and I also added png and audio-dummy to register known media files we still have no specific parsers (real, wma, …)

It’s already stable, when I have time I’ll add a non-dual process version of process and check, so people with “correct” media files can use this and benefit from a much faster version (however this will rely on developers adding support to choose both implementations).

Today I got the complete stack working on my N800 device!

• Erlang
• ICU
  
• CouchDB
• Ajatus
  

They are far from perfect yet but I'm sure it'll get better little by little.
Currently I'm

• preparing the packages for releasing them through maemo extras repository.
• trying to compile the latest erlang R12.b.0 (now the package is R11.b.1)
• adding dependencies to couchdb package
• packaging Ajatus also

After first releases there are some possible tweaking to do... I still get some Segfaults at some points while using couchdb.

If someone would like to give this a try the hard way:
All the current packages can be found here http://protoblogr.net/downloads/erlang/

1. Download and install erlang-base_11.b.1-1_armel.deb to the device (after download: dpkg -i  erlang-base_11.b.1-1_armel.deb)
2. Download and install libicu36_3.6-2_armel.deb
3. Download and install couchdb_0.7.2-1_armel.deb
4. Get the latest release of Ajatus and follow it's installation instructions

There might be some dependencies which have to be manually installed. (Will be fixed later)
Currently the CouchDb installs itself to /usr and the databases are located at /usr/var/lib/couchdb.
I changed the DB path in /usr/etc/couchdb/couch.ini to point to my other memorycard (/media/mmc2/couchdb_db) which had some more space left.

Hopefully I get to release these as soon as possible for easier use.

Great thanks to the folks at #couchdb channel (nslater, jan,...)
And to Piotras

I got my shiny new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet today.

Yes, I’ll admit it… I’m stoked!

You’ll notice that it’s in a nice little leather case as well. You can see it better here (although, I don’t know how long that link will be work, so do a search on eBay for “N810 case” and you’ll probably find it). The N810 itself aside (which everyone knows is pretty dang super cool, so I don’t have to say all that much about it), the leather case is really great too. It has two slots for SD cards, a cut-away where the stylus on the N810 is, a magnetic strap, and an optional belt-clip. The case is black and is made of quality genuine leather. Coolness! (The photo here was lovingly taken by my pal, Tyson H.)

Ok, so, yeah… The N810 itself? It’s awesome. You know about my enthusiasm for the N800 already. It’s basically just a smaller N800 with a slide-out keyboard and on board GPS. Everything else is mostly the same (well, except that the N810 doesn’t have a 360 degree camera or an FM radio receiver like the N800 does). But, the thing is sweet. Go get one.

Lastly, because of some testing help that I gave to the wonderful maemo folks (they’re the Nokia team in charge of all things software-related for the Internet Tablets), they’re going to send me a gift (actually, the gift is in the mail right now). I’ll write another post when I receive it.

Anyway, happy tableting! (And, thanks, maemo team, for choosing me to be one of the lucky Device Program recipients!)

I have already asked this on Facebook (and I received a lots of answers), but those who haven’t answered it yet and maybe are not reading my questions there, please give me your comment. Which programming language is your favorite? I personally prefer lowish level languages such as C and C++ (I like especially C++, unlike many C-g-object-people, but now I would like to hear some different opinion, that is not just from my head), so what is your opinion?

Currently there are alternatives other than the plain C for Maemo development, for example C++ works out of the box (you don’t need anything extra) and Python can be used with installing some extra packages. How do you feel about those, are those what you want or is there something else you would rather like? If you can give any comments why do you prefer some language, please let me know. Please take also in account that some languages may be less resource hungry than the others, and the Internet tablets are, because they are small pocketable devices, still resource limited embedded devices.

Instructions: Go to my blog, if you haven’t registered, register, and leave your comment. I would be interested to know your opinion.

As of speaking about Python, by the way, are you aware of PyPhantom?
http://pyphantom.garage.maemo.org/
Have you used it and/or do you find it useful? Have you developed applets / plugins for Hildon Desktop with or without it with Python language? Have you found it useful? Has that been cool or not so cool? If you have encountered problems, have you considered filing bugs to garage.maemo.org -page?

While you are thinking your answer, maybe you want to see a little set of interesting pictures: Click here to see. My eyes are propably still looking like these on this my little friend (this is The news of today, not my cat, but the pictures behind the link).

Anyhow, C, C++, Python, Java, C#, Vala, D, you name it, please keep me posted!

Maemo Wordpy has been updated to the .6 beta and while that’s a small release number, the enhancements are major. Daniel has now built in support for multiple accounts, blogger accounts and posting and pulling images to flickr. If you have been considering how to blog on the go, Maemo WordPy is the answer.

Technorati Tags: Maemo, blog, writing, n800, n810, os2008, wordpress, blogger, flickr

In the comments to my previous post about remapping keys on the keyboard of my N810 there was a mention of editing the X server keyboard mapping file at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-44, which I assumed was a pretty nasty hack. But Daniel Stone, who does the X server development for Maemo, said that it wasn’t a hack at all. xmodmap is the hack.

Yesterday I was starting to get annoyed at having to manually load the mapping at every reboot (cause I have to reboot frequently to get GPS working again, groan), so I swapped techniques. The format of the file is pretty easy to understand, use “bar” where you want to put the pipe symbol and “Tab” where you want to put tab. And while I was in there digging at it I changed my mappings to, I made Fn-space the tab key instead of using semicolon. Just seems like a more intuitive setup.

The ogg-support is listed as the The Pearl for OS2008, thanks! :)

Even though the ogg-support has got nice ratings in the download page, it doesn’t work perfectly on the OS2008. Most of the issues has some sort of workaround so I decided to make a summary post of them.

Ogg-support breaks VOIP calls

Ogg-support adds Speex voice codec to the system and it seems that the VOIP client advertises it as the first choice. If both parties have it installed, it’s selected. But. The VOIP engine (or whatever) doesn’t know or just refuses to use Speex, so the VOIP stream is not actually sent, properly at least.

If you delete the Speex’ GStreamer plugin, the calls seems to work nicely.

Bug report (#2811).

All Oggs from Map are listed in Media Player

The Metalayer Crawler adds all known media files to the Media Player’s Library. With ogg-support also Ogg files are recognized and added to the Library. Problem is that the Map application includes almost 2000 Oggs with N810 so they are added to the Library too.

A workaround is mentioned in the ogg-support’s help forum. It requires editing the SQL database after the files are added to the Library.

Bug report (#2772).

File Manager doesn’t launch Media Player for Oggs

I had to modify the mime type XML a bit to get File Manager to recognize videos and audios in Ogg container separately instead of just showing all *.ogg files as e.g. audio/x-vorbis. To be specific I had to remove the *.ogg pattern from the XML file.

It seems that the hildon_mime_open_file() in libhildonmime doesn’t launch the file without the *.ogg pattern tag in XML.

No workaround for this one.

Bug report (#2521).

PS. Many problems are reported in the Internet Tablet Talk’s forums. I don’t follow those frequently so please notify me in the garage’s forums about possible bugs, issues or workarounds. I do get a instant mail notification about those. Thanks.

Some people are doing some extraordinary stuff with their new internet tablets. Now that the N810 units getting into developer hands (after countless problems with LetsTalk - Did they really ask you for your Social Security Number?) the excitement is growing.

• Richard G. of WOM World (and others)made a Tetris-like Facebook app. You can play it in your browser.
• Maemo Wordpy skyrocketed in functionality. Jonathan Greene writes all about it.
  
• Jenn at Pocketables benchmarked the Internet Tablets' browser.
• Kate Alhola hacked USB OnTheGo on the N810 and has the best write-up on the subject to date.
• Dr. Ari Jaaksi notified the community of a very nice Maemo Technology Overview
• Here's a favorite hack of mine: Using a Nokia N95 as both a Bluetooth modem AND Bluetooth GPS on the N800.
• Tim Samoff found himself with a SPARE N810 - and he's giving it away.

Finally: INdT is hosting the Bossaconference '08 in Brazil. It's a gathering of developers in open conversation about Linux device development. I will be there, delivering a lecture on community involvement in open-source applications. I have a bunch of feedback already (thank you very much to #maemo IRC folks) but ask my readers this question:

What do you feel developers or users doing WRONG when developing/releasing/giving feedback on open source applications?

Yesterday, you might remember me mentioning that Nokia was sending me a gift for helping them do some testing. Actually, it wasn’t Nokia, per se, but a friend, one of the fine people on the maemo development team, Jake Kunnari. Anyway, I was thinking that the gift would be a T-shirt or something — you know, just a small gesture of thanks.

I saw the post on Maemo Apps about the WordPy update. I just installed it and used it to upload an image to Flickr, now I’m posting from it. The image I uploaded is my Serial Experiments Lain inspired N810 background:

other then I said before I'm now releasing my IpHome home/desktop plugin for Maemo 4.x (for the N8x0 devices) even I don't have a N810 yet.

In this release it now supports virtual interfaces in the style of wlan0:1 which was requested by some people.

Please report back any errors.

Left to do for Chinook is support for a transparent background - to get rid of the white ugly window.

Install IpHome

other then I said before I'm now releasing my IpHome home/desktop plugin for Maemo 4.x (for the N8x0 devices) even I don't have a N810 yet.

In this release it now supports virtual interfaces in the style of wlan0:1 which was requested by some people.

Please report back any errors.

Left to do for Chinook is support for a transparent background - to get rid of the white ugly window.

Install IpHome

The Nokia N800 was introduced in early 2007 as a replacement for the Nokia 770. It had a much faster processor, double the amount of RAM, and many other significant improvements such as a built-in camera for video calls, built-in stereo speakers, two SD-sized memory card slots and a built-in stand. It also had what many people considered to be a more attractive curvy steel-and-plastic casing. To put the icing on the cake, Nokia took the internet tablet range within its Nseries sub-brand, usually reserved for its high end expensive smartphones.

The N800 also had a new operating system, Internet Tablet OS 2007, which replaced the 770's OS 2006. There was no version of OS 2007 available for the 770, and software written for the 770 would not work on the N800. 770 owners, many of whom had only just bought their tablets in late 2006, felt abandoned by Nokia as the support for their tablet disappeared.

In late 2007, Nokia announced the N810, which was nominally the replacement for the N800. It too would have a new operating system, OS 2008, and featured a built-in keyboard and built-in GPS satellite navigation receiver. However, Nokia seemed to learn its lesson from the 770 fiasco, and the N810 wasn't really a replacement for the N800 but more of an alternative model. The N810's processor and memory is identical to that of the N800, and OS 2008 was made available as a free upgrade for the N800. An N800 running OS 2008 is technically identical to the N810, running exactly the same programs at exactly the same speed. The N800 even has some of its own hardware advantages to counter the N810's keyboard and GPS: the N800 has two memory card slots as opposed to the N810's one, and the N800 has a built-in FM radio receiver which the N810 does not have.

In truth, the N800 and N810 are the same tablet in computing terms, they just have different casings and different external hardware features. If you've bought an N800 it will receive support for just as long as the N810, because underneath their skin they are the same device.


Technical Specifications

Name: Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

Year of Launch: Early 2007

Weight: 206g

Battery Life: 3.5 hours browsing, 13 days standby

Wireless: Internet access through Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), internet access through Bluetooth-compatible mobile phones supporting DUN profile

Screen: 800x480 pixels, 65 thousand colours

Camera: 352x288 pixels in video mode

Storage Memory: 256 megabytes built-in, two SDHC memory card slots officially support cards up to 8 gigabytes each, unofficially up to 16 gigabytes each. SDHC slot compatible with SD, miniSD, microSD, MMC and RS-MMC card sizes.

RAM: 128 megabytes

Processor Speed: 400mhz when running OS 2008 (330mhz when running OS 2007)

Software Compatibility: OS 2007 or OS 2008 (depending on which firmware version is installed)

Hey you. Yeah YOU. The one with the shiny new N810 in your pocket! I know you're out there.
Tell me something. What are two things you love about the N810 and two things you'd change about it?
Thanks!

Maybe you have already noticed that there's now MediaBox 0.93 available in the maemo-extras repositories for OS 2007 and OS 2008.

So what's new in this release?

First of all, rendering became a bit faster. Many rendering operations are now directly performed on the X server where they run 2D-hardware-accelerated. Previously, only the kinetic scrolling was done like this. Especially the Nokia 770 gives very smooth results that way.

But much more important, the media scanner became a lot quicker. So if there are no new thumbnails to generate, it will scan your media in almost no time. Together with deferred thumbnail assembling, this greatly speeds up startup time.
The scanner is now also much more robust and knows how to get past bad media files that make mplayer hang during thumbnailing. Oh, and you can now watch the new thumbnails while they are being created.

I have improved the ID3 tag parser as well and it supports ID3 v1, v2.2, v2.3, v2.4 now. If you have album art embedded in your ID3 tags, then chances are good that MediaBox will be able to show it.

MediaBox also runs on the Nokia 770 with OS 2006, but video still does not work reliably there, and there are still some memory issues to be solved. But it's perfectly usable as a photo viewer or for playing music. Of course I'll keep testing MediaBox on the 770 and try to make it work even better.

See the release notes for more.

N95 pic 078
Originally uploaded by thoughtfix I was having some problems with my N800 (hence a lack of OS2008 software reviews lately) running down a full charge in fewer than 8 hours of standby. I would leave home fully charged and leave the tablet in my jacket pocket at work. By the end of the work day, I was getting low battery chirps. I changed chargers, swapped my battery with my old 770, and removed some applications but still had the problem

I turned to InternetTabletTalk forums to see if others were having the same. It turns out a few users were and some tracked it down to a corrupt swap file on the memory card. I don't know how that would drain battery life, but it did. The following day, tested it by leaving it in my jacket pocket all day with no memory cards installed. It kept the normal standby charge. The following day, I put memory cards back in but removed and recreated the swap file. Initially, that did not work. I don't know why. I finally resized the swap file to 64MB, then expanded it back to 128MB. This worked.

An odd solution to a very odd problem, but it works. I'm glad to have a functional Internet Tablet back!

I’ve been using Google analytics for Tinymail.org for a few months now.

I was mostly interested in results per city. As expected is Helsinki scoring high. Since a lot of Modest’s developers live in Spain there are a few cities with a lot of visits in Spain too. Now I know where you guys live!

Nothing surprising. Except maybe the visitors from the Indian cities Hyderabad and Bangalore. I wonder what Indian company is working on a mobile E-mail client? The visitors from South America are interesting too! Are you guys working on one for OLPC?

I also have a lot of Brooklyn and Tempe visitors. That’s Red Hat, right?

What Nokia division can we find in Oulu by the way? And Sydney, is that jdub visiting?

Cute and I guess typical are all European cities. All major cities in Europe had a lot of visitors. Just never really a lot, unless they are located in Finland and are called either Helsinki or Oulu.

With one single exception for Europe: a city in my own country, Heist-Op-Den-Berg. So, who’s that Tinymail fan in Heist-Op-Den-Berg? Let’s get a drink somewhere? What about FOSDEM this year? It was not me, my own home city scored like all other European cities.

Disappointing is Russia. The visits for all of Russia compares to one European city, all Russian visitors came from either Moscow, Tula or Lisichansk. In Russia E-mail libraries code you?

I had three visits from Honolulu!

What is strange is that Google analytic’s analysis of amount of visitors doesn’t really match my actual Apache logs if I manually count them. Something like 60% less unique visits on Google analytics. I wonder at what point will Google analytics start grouping the hits of a user as an actual visit?

As you can see from my image above, currently the Nokia 770 appears unloved in relation to it's own Nokia children the N800 & N810 i.e. No running installation of Canola2 beta. However any day now, there should be a an update to the Canola2 beta which (in addition to bug fixes and improvements) will enable the software to be installed on the Nokia 770 and OS 2006.

In readiness for this date, I have prepared a set of screen captures to illustrate how Canola2 Beta operates on all our Nokia Internet Tablets.

1a) Start Canola from the application menu, (Installation defaults Canola to Extras menu)


1b) After a few moments the Canola home Menu screen should appear.


1c) Clicking on the Music Icon, in the Menu, provides Local, Podcast & IRadio options


1d) Clicking on the Local icon, provides a list of options for local music which can be scrolled up/down, with a flick of the stylus or finger, (Kinetic scrolling)


1e) Scrolling down, presents remaining options under Music, local.


Basically the above images illustrated how the menu structure of Canola Operates from the home menu of Canola.

Note: The return arrow in the bottom left hand corner of the User Interface UI, this button allows us to return up through the menu structure. Also be aware that pressing and holding this option is the quickest way to get to the top home menu (Whenever you can select this icon).

Forward to Page 2

Back to Page 1

So once again from the top Canola menu we are able to select other options.


2a) For example selecting the Settings option provides, Media Library, Choose theme and Internet Media options.


2b) Selecting Choose Theme, allows switching between the Green and Graphite themes, simply by ticking the theme required.


2c) I like the way the theme changes from one to another, with a simple tick in a box.


2d) Selecting Media Library, now using the Graphite Theme.


2e) Selecting Media Library, allows users to specify the watch folders for Audio, Photos and Video independently.


2f) Initially, when Canola is first started all watch folders are set to "off" here we are looking at the "Audio" folder options.

Note how the eye symbol has a cross through it indicating that they are not being watched ("Audio Clips" is internal to device, "Removable Card" is the external card, "Internal Card" is removable/replaceable on N800 and None removable/replaceable on N810)


2g) By selecting the eye symbol we can switch between non watching (eye Crossed) to watching (eye normal) which indicates that from this Audio folder level and below, each area is being watched.


2h) Here we are looking at the "Photo" folder options. (All being Watched)


2i) Here we are looking at the "Videos" folder options. (All being Watched)


2j) Generally when changes are made to Watched folders and or items are added or deleted from the watched folders, when you next switch back to Canola UI you will see "updating Database"



Forward to Page 3.

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---edited 30/01/08--- to add new 3c) "cascade of thumbnailed photos" the later images re-ordered/numbered accordingly, ensure correct usage sequence is maintained.

3a) Here we are looking at the photos options, where we have My Photos and Photocasts


3b) Selecting My Photos, Gives us folders with Photos found by scanning areas to be watched.


3c) Selecting the folder All Photos, provides a cascade of thumbnailed photos, which can be easily kinetically scrolled from side to side.


3d) Upon selecting a photo, Canola takes a second, to load All Photos into a side to side scrollable Filmstrip view. Here is loading the photos in a manner that means we can quickly scroll from one picture to the next in this mode.


3e) Here we can see that the Pine_Forrest Photo is loaded and also have an idea of photo content on either side of this image.


3f) Here we can see that the Humpback Whale Photo again with an idea of photo content on either side of this particular image.


3g) Here we can see the display options, i.e. we can manually go forward and back or we can play our photos as a slide show.


3h) Here we can see what happens when we use the rotate picture options, on the left of the screen.



Forward to Page 4.

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4a) Here we are Videos



4b) Here we are viewing the videos available locally in a filmstrip view.



4c) Here we are playing the Anna Abreu Video that came on the memory of the N810.



4d) Another Video being played in fullscreen view, which is enetered and exited from, by clicking in the middle of the video window.



Forward to Page 5

From page 4

5a) With the Internet Media option in the settings menu we are able to specify Podcasts, Internet Radio and Photocasts feeds that are of most interest to ourselves.


5b) Lets take Internet Radio as an example of how to save a URL of interest. First we go to the Add URL Menu.


5c) Then we switch to the Nokia's microb browser to find a suitable Internet radio URL of interest, Here I am looking at the Shoutcast stations and am selecting the "tune in" button in order to have the option in microb to copy the URL Link.



5d) Back in Canola, where if we select the "Add URL" field the finger keboard automatically appears, where we can then use the paste option to good use to enter the URL we just copied from the microb browser window.


5e) Here we can see the Shoutcast URL entered in the Canola URL field. (Tip don't forget to hit the return Key to allow Canola to check URL and if acceptable add to your personalised list of Internet Radio URL's)



5f) When we have entered and saved a URL correctly it will appear as shoutcast.com (1025) is shown in image below. (Note the pencil icon for editing the shoutcast URL)



5g) If we select the Pencil, we are able to Edit or Delete the URL. (Although when it's selected we lose the information about the URL we are about to edit or delete?)



5h) Going back into Canola to play Audio, Internet Radio we are presented with Internet Radio stations than we have loaded in the Canola settings menu.


5i) Selecting the station can be initially confusing when the URL provides a number of sub-url's to ensure we connect successfully to the station of interest. (i.e. If one link is not working the idea is to automatically move to next.) I always pick the first in the list!



5j) Here we are playing the Internet Radio station in Canola. Note that the information is missing about the track being played, believe this will be fixed soon.


5k) By comparison and to contrast, I ran the same Internet Radio URL through the standard Media player of the NIT & OS2008. Note that artist and Track information (All sub-url's listed too)


5l) Here I have switched the standard media player to single station and playback information view.



To page 6, to be continued!

From Page 5

6a) Plugin icons in extras menu for Album Cover & Video Thumb Plugins. These and very soon hopefully more plugins will probably be found Here.


6b) Album Cover Plugin at work (Note: Requires internet connection)


6c) Album Cover Plugin Complete. (Simply close the window once script has confirmed task complete)


6d) Here is the resulting, Album cover view in Canola, where selecting an Album will provide more information on selected Album.


6e) You will notice that I selected the Tom Baxter, Skybound Album and am now provided with a list of tracks on the album in track list order. (Note: Kinetic scrolling is available for viewing the tracks)


6f) You can see that I selected the track "The Last Shot" which is now plying in the standard Canola player window, but with the addition of album art.


6g) Video Thumb Plugin at work (Note: this utility scans Video's to grab an frame from the Video, at least this is my understanding of what the option does, its currently a little hit and miss at grabbing a frame with an image?)


6h) Video Thumb Plugin Complete. (Again simply close the window once script has confirmed task complete)


6i) Here is the resulting, My Videos view in Canola, where selecting a video will begin video playback in Canola Player window. (See Page 4 for further details on Video Playback)


Currently "The End" of my Canola2 beta Howto, but please watch this space and re-vist my blog as I do intend to update existing pages with more detail and add additional New Pages; when Canola2 improvements are released such as UPnP Server, Controller and Player capabilities.

Return to Page 1 of Canola2 beta Howto.

With the introduction of Canola2 beta on the Nokia 770 comes the possibility that Canola will not play any files that use accented characters in the filename.

Ever the resourceful I thought to myself what is the best free program that would allow the quick and easy remove/replacement of accents from any filename. The program I found was Bulk Rename Utility.

Below are some images to highlight the option to use to replace accents with standard characters which highlights in green the outcome prior to committing the rename of the files.

a) First and example of the different accent characters in *.txt files, renamed to standard characters using BRU.

b) Applying the same technique to a typical set of mp3 files, where the filename utilises accented Characters.


I appreciate that a mp3 tagging program will probably do the same but the beauty of BRU is it can be used on many different file types and in many many different situations and therefore thought it worth bringing to the attention of Nokia 770, OS 2006 users and promoting in my blog.

I could not find a similar program in a GUI for MAC or Linux PC's, please do offer suggestions if you are aware of any.

So we plan to buy Trolltech. I know those guys and I think they are true professionals! Good stuff. Good for Nokia and Trolltech.

Nokia's intention to acquire Trolltech is a good news to maemo, too. Nokia has now more technology alternatives to use and a wider outreach to open source communities.

Both GNOME and KDE are very interesting and active projects. Our strong participation in the Gnome community and the new access to KDE and Trolltech's technology puts us in an unique position to create even more interesting mobilde devices, together with the open source communities.

This is all about the products and how to make even better products to our customers. This will help!

I was bored and reading moblin mailinglist, when in a message there was a link to the libmokoui2 code, there was mentioned that there were a python bindings. This library has the famous Moko Finger Scroll function.

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Click here to install Flashblock for MicroB.

Remember to restart your MicroB browser twice!

Troll Door, by Irish Typepad Nokia going after Trolltech and Trolltech going inside Nokia, that’s an interesting move. Somewhat surprising move (I also knew about it by reading the press releases), but sensible in fact. The community reactions have been as interesting. No wonder, in this story you can find all the elements for a [...]

Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16th to 19th of March at Summerville Beach Resort. The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.

Let’s go! We’re waiting for you.

Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org.

Speakers confirmed until now:

AARON SEIGO - KDE/QT4 On Embedded Devices
ALEXANDRE OLIVA - Red Hat / GCC / GNU Binutils / GNU Libc
ALP TOKER - Webkit
CARL WORTH - Cairo
DANIEL “THOUGHTFIX” GENTLEMAN - Noise to Signal
DENIS KENZIOR - Trolltech
HARALD WELTE - Ex-Openmoko
JOHN “J5″ PALMIERI - Optimizing D-bus
LENNART POETTERING - Pulseaudio
MARCEL HOLTMANN - BlueZ
MARCELO OLIVEIRA - Canola
MICHAEL “MICKEY” LAUER - Openmoko / Open Embedded
OYVIND KOLAS - Clutter
RASTERMAN - EFL
ZACK RUSIN - KDE

An easy way to add more options to the Settings/Screen menu in Maemo (OS2007/Bora and OS2008/Chinook). Simply launches an appropriate .sh script to add more options for screen dimming and blanking timeouts (10, 30, 60 minutes, 8 hours, 24 hours).

Uninstalling will restore the original values.

[Does not install any application anywhere!]

Credits:

• ArnimS et. al. for the original idea and gconf example (internettablettalk.com)
• Khertan for PyPackager (khertan.net)’

Available for OS2007 and OS2008.

Screenshot:

I decided to just do it and throw together .NET bindings for Tinymail. They are nearly finished and looking great. I might never have told anybody, but a really sweet looking E-mail API for my favorite programming language C# was my original reason when I started Tinymail.

My mention of battery life problems with my N800 prompted others (both in comments here and over private communication) to tell me they were having the same problems since the OS2008 upgrade. Ten people mentioning the same thing to me is beyond coincidence. Let's see if we can help isolate the problem and file a proper bug in the bugzilla.

Problem: Battery drains within 8 hours of non-use in standby mode.

Installed applications:

• boingomobile
• camera
• canola2
• libuiw
• load-applet (but the problem showed up before this was installed)
• maemo-recorder
• map
• mauku
• mnotify
• osso-xterm
• Pidgin Instant Messenger
• python2.5-feedparser
• python2.5-pyinotify
• quiver
• rdesktop
• skype
• tutorial-home-applet
• vc-epg-widget
• videocenter
• videocenter-ci-plugins-base
• videocenter-plugins
• xgalaga

When checking the processes using the statusbar applet, expected applications are running plus goboingo (even though I am not connected to a Boingo hotspot.)

Others who have this battery life problem: What do you have installed? We can see if we have something in common.

Some people have been writing about the USB OTG use with need to hack the cable by soldering a few wires together. Even Ars technica went the hard way of soldering a cable. This is not the way to do it my friends. On a computer-like device, the way is to 'solder software', not hardware. I found the instructions on software solution from muru and then thought:"This is still just too hard". So, what to do? Make it easy, of course.


Enter USBControl


I thought that this is worth a full hour of my time. So, today I put together a new application that you can use to switch the device (N800 or N810) between USB Host and USB OTG modes. All you need, is an USB Female-Female adaptor like this:
http://www.amazon.com/USB-Type-Female-Coupler-Adapter/dp/B000I97N0S

So, remember, that is USB A female to female adaptor. Costs pennies. Well, almost.

After you have the USB adaptor, just install ukmp from here: Garage

That version is beta. You may need to install ukmp first from here: maemo.org

ukmp is my media player, but it now comes bundled with uktube (youtube downloader) and USBControl.

Finally, open USBController from your extras menu. Click on HOST. Attach USB cable and e.g keyboard to the other end and.... There you go. Nothing else needed. Open notes, xterm, whatnot and start typing. Or, remove the kb and attach a memory stick. For me, even wireless keyboards work just fine without any powered hub. Same for one memory stick, but another memory stick needed more juice than the device had.

If your peripheral needs more juice, just put a powered hub in between. Simple, huh?